My grandmother politely informed me yesterday that it had been a while since my last post. (My apologies to anyone else out there who cares as much as Nana does.) So this post is mostly for her, and partly to convince myself that even though I felt pretty lazy most of the month, I really wasn’t.

But before I get into the recap, I would like to address last Sunday’s ClimbAmerica! event. In short, it was awesome. I had a lot more fun than I expected–I mean, does anyone ever expect to enjoy running up stairs?–and I did it much faster than I thought I could.

I had guessed it would take me about 15 minutes to finish climbing the Prudential Tower’s 50 flights of stairs. When I signed up for the event, I registered as a “Runner,” as did Frank. When we were lining up, Frank and I briefly considered dropping down into the “Quick Climb” group (for two reasons: 1. Because that’s the group Frank’s friends had signed up for, and 2. Because at that moment, surrounded by super-serious college kids in their track unis, running up that many stairs no longer seemed very appealing), but ultimately decided to stay with the runners and see just how fast we could really be.

I ended up finishing in 10:16 (landing a rank of 38 out of 574, boom!), and Frank finished close behind in 10:58 (63/574, still boom!-worthy). We struggled for a few minutes to catch our breath, and I guzzled as much water as I could in an effort to make my Sahara-dry throat feel normal again. After the event, the team went out for brunch (by brunch I mostly mean Bloody Marys and Mimosas). It’s hard to say what made me happier: running up 1000+ stairs five minutes faster than I thought I could, or the delicious celebratory champagne and OJ afterward…let’s just call the whole morning a win.

It feels even taller than it looks.

And now, the part where I try to make me feel better about myself. Except it won’t work because I was hoping to hit 75 miles by the end of the month, and fell short by 7.35 miles. SEVEN-POINT-THREE-FIVE MILES. Ugh, I suck.

Hike/Snowboard: 3 days, 09:38:30/16.54 miles (34:58 avg pace…I’m not a very fast hiker to begin with, and trudging along in slowshoes–my super clever name for snowshoes!– while carrying a snowboard on my back just makes me even slower. Blargh.), ~3200 calories burned

So, to recap my recap, I ran/hiked/walked a total of 67.65 miles over 15 days. There were 10 “questionable” workouts (climbing, lift-served snowboarding, yoga), a rogue session of lifting, and 1 “race” if you count ClimbAmerica! as such. Which I think you should, because it was chip-timed and I have a bib from it.

And apparently I burned quite a few calories. 10,970? That’s crazy. If burning 3500 calories equals losing a pound, then I should have lost 3 pounds. I didn’t. In fact, between January first and today, I only lost 0.8 pounds.

I had been doing pretty well and was down 2 pounds by the second week of January…but then the awesomeevil grocery store across the street started to make these:

Um, yeah. They are exactly as delicious as they look.

And cupcake weight goes on fast. *Sigh*

Now it’s February. At 7:00 tonight, registration opens for a 21-mile trail race in May that I’m really excited about. Even though I’ve been running fairly consistently, there’s no way I’m prepared for this race…so I should probably step up my game a little bit and start training for it, yeah? Yeah.

I think the reason I didn’t hit 75 miles in January was because I didn’t make it a goal until four days before the end of the month. I’m guessing that if I had made it a goal from the beginning, I could have done it. So for February, I’m going to aim for 85 miles (with lots of “long” runs to train for the race), and work as hard as I possibly can to make it happen.

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One thought on “For Nana/January Recap”

Thank you, first good read in a few days! Have to admit I did read some of Tim’s the other day : ) And you’re awesome. I’d be still trying to get to the 10th floor, or I would have met some nice EMT’s . Wish that there had been some pictures of all of ;you though.